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Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone

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Re: Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone

#501

Post by ivanbakel »

djsumdog wrote: post #450
solidasparagus wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specifically the music festivals I've been to. It's fun and a wonderful feeling for a while, but eventually the idiots/assholes will become a problem that needs to be dealt with. Or nature throws a disaster at you and there is chaos. It's a little hard to come up with historical examples because the utopia portion is often quite short and overshadowed by the negatives that follow. Generally, I would point to almost a…

The book Animal Farm is a great representation of this concept as a fable.

Animal Farm is not intended to be a fable. It is an allegorical retelling of Stalin's co-option of the Russian revolution - and that co-option is presented as only being possible because the populace is illiterate and ill-informed, which allows for revisionism from the Stalin-figure.

Orwell almost certainly did support anarchist revolution and utopia, given his role in the Spanish Civil War - and his concern about the suppression of anarchism through a totalitarian control of information is exactly what 1984 is about. He never would have felt that "Anarchic utopias do not stay utopic for all that long."

Re: Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone

#502

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

djsumdog wrote: post #489
ogre_codes wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder what the end game is I don't know, it's like a massive catch-22. People are sick of police abuses, but society needs police to some extent. I agree with much of what the protests are about, but struggle with their solutions.

But if you look at the numbers, police abuse has gone down. There were 1007 shootings by US police last year. Yes, that's still terribly high, even per-capita, for a high income/developed nation, but police departments have been embracing body cameras. If you watch YouTube channels like Donut Operator where people do police breakdowns, a lot of people .. really do deserve to get shot. Body cameras also make it way ea…

> Maybe more money should be diverted to training and wages, and less to equipment and vehicles?

The police in my town make more than I do. NYPD officers make way more than I do and get sweet benefits I will never enjoy. In return they act petulant and ignore their duties whenever someone forces them to apply less than brutal tactics to non-threatening people.

They need comprehensive retraining and removal of the problem cases.

Re: Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone

#503

Post by hkai »

dag11 wrote: post #199
conroy wrote: post #84

A friend lives in Seattle and texted me today about his visit last night: > I was there last night and it's such a cool pseudo utopian place > The media coverage of it is WILD > People on the internet are convinced it's protected by armed guards and people are dying of hunger and instead its...like a music festival campground > There are speakers, musicians, art walls. I took a group pic for a bunch of black guys las…

> The media coverage of it is WILD Yep. I live three blocks south of CHAZ and it's so overblown. Conservative family from the east-coast have told me they're very worried for me, and I check fox news and see images from "Seattle" of parking lots of cars on fire. Those images were from Minneapolis last month, not even from Seattle. As another nearby commenter said, last week when the police were here gassing us, throw…

What you're saying is fair, but also imagine that's how conservatives felt for years. The left-leaning media outlets appear to be wildly exaggerating things they want to exaggerate, just as Fox News does on their side. Not sure if examples are needed.

Re: Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone

#504

Post by rideontime »

drevil-v2 wrote: post #375
pera wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The media coverage of it is WILD I live 7 blocks away from "the zone" and can confirm, I have never in my life seen anything alike in this regard. The scale of the misinformation being spread in social networks and news media reached a level I couldn't believe possible before. Seriously, it's beyond absurd. If anyone is interested, I have been taking some pictures of the ongoing protests (including a few of the zon…

Seattle police chief said on TV [1] that "Rapes, robberies and all sorts of violent acts have been occurring in the area and we're not able to get to [them]." Doesn’t sound very utopian [1] https://twitter.com/mrandyngo/status/1271291958296604675?s=2...

How would she know?

Re: Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone

#505

Post by mcv »

chimeracoder wrote: post #488
kenneth wrote: post #486

I am rather amused that the same group is simultaneously calling for the tearing down of secessionist monuments and statues, while promoting a secession of their own. The cognitive dissonance is real.

> I am rather amused that the same group is simultaneously calling for the tearing down of secessionist monuments and statues, while promoting a secession of their own. The cognitive dissonance is real. From the webpage: > Fundamentally, CHAZ is an occupation of Capitol Hill, not an official declaration of independence. They are fairly clear that their ultimate goal is neither secession or independence. The area was…

Not only that, but those secessionist statues being turn down, are about people who lead a violent rebellion against the US in order to protect their ability to enslave people.

This protest is quite the opposite in nearly every possible way.

Re: Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone

#506

Post by hellomyguys »

remarkEon wrote: post #335
hellomyguys wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you told me this stat a month ago, I would never believe it. 39% is a shocking amount and I can only imagine it is going to increase. You're right that we would still need to train a new organization to deal with violent events. But you're also ignoring the upside of not having a cop with a gun issuing speeding tickets, or dealing with someone experiencing mental health issues, or other things that could be better…

>give more financial support to address homelessness, mental health, and domestic violence. is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this poll, which should be obvious. I'm not ignoring anything. Cops respond to a variety of calls, all the time ... because there simply are not enough of them to have this "specialized" force you think would solve all of these problems. The grand irony of all of this is that the defunding of…

>Cops respond to a variety of calls, all the time ... because there simply are not enough of them to have this "specialized" force you think would solve all of these problems.

This makes no sense.

Re: Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone

#507

Post by nickfromseattle »

jerf wrote: post #21
Pfhreak wrote: post #16

Seattle police vacated the east precinct, fully expecting protesters to burn it down. Instead, the protesters set up an open zone, compiled a set of demands, and from all accounts set up something cool and unique. Here's hoping it sustains itself for a while.

No, not even remotely "by all accounts". There are plenty of accounts that isn't "cool and unique" but is just another place ruled by violent thugs: https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/h077uv/raz_simone_... I'm not passing judgment yet since the days are young and the political bias on the ground is thick in both directions. But it is definitely not "by all accounts". But my personal bias on the table is that y…

Here is an update: https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/h7f01r/i_was_wrong...

My friends that have walked through the area can confirm.

Why predict defeat?

Why not appreciate the experiment as an alternative to our broken system?

Yeah, it'll eventually go away.

But maybe change will be secured, and there are some ideas that do make sense and will spread or stick around.

Is the worst that could happen worse than the status quo?

You sound like one of the commenters on Drew Houston's Ask HN telling him no-one will pay for rsync.

Re: Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone

#508

Post by mcv »

zozbot234 wrote: post #499
mcv wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't it the police who abandoned this area in the first place? The impression I'm getting from this and other events from the past weeks is that the police would like us to believe that without them, society turns to chaos, but in practice, US police turns out to be a major source of chaos, and without them things often turn much more peaceful. I'm not saying there should be no police at all, but that police should…

The whole area is only a few blocks. A society on that scale can be peaceful even without any organized police presence, but we knew that already: just look at how any small town or village is run. The problem with larger neighborhoods and cities is that often there is no real sense of community to speak of, so nothing for police to "work with" in the first place.

Maybe there's a valuable lesson in that too: foster a sense of community, instead of trying to control people by force.

My impression is also that many cases of police abuse in the US happen in situations where most of the police officers policing a community are not themselves members of that community, but outsiders looking down on that community.

Re: Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone

#509

Post by gerbal »

kenneth wrote: post #486

I am rather amused that the same group is simultaneously calling for the tearing down of secessionist monuments and statues, while promoting a secession of their own. The cognitive dissonance is real.

> secessionist monuments

You misspelled white supremacist. All of the confederate monuments I know of were built during _CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTS_ as an expression of power by white supremacist governments and political traditions.

Re: Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone

#510

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #392
thu2111 wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then there's also this: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EaQyClgU4AEJnWf?format=jpg&name=... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EaQyCmMUEAEn_1o?format=jpg&name=... I've not before seen a summer street festival where armed militias wearing bulletproof vests patrol the streets.

I truly don't understand the problem here. Can you tell me what it is that makes these people dangerous and scary, but the similarly armed protestors who showed up at government buildings a month ago — or, frankly, the police — fine?

What makes these people dangerous and scary is that they're carrying dangerous and scary weapons. The flak jackets and face masks aren't making it any less scary either.

Personally, I'm not afraid of the police, of protesters, of armed militias, etc. I'm afraid of people with guns. Why does anyone carry a gun, unless they intend to use it, once some set of conditions obtain? I don't want to be around people like that, and I really don't want to live in places where they go around on public streets like this.

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